Everything the Light Touches

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Reading a chunky and immersive story not once but twice in two months is extremely rare for me. Janice Pariat’s Everything The Light Touches holds that kind of power over me. Wh- No. Ruggie, you bastard.” You harshly whisper to the boy next to you, while he just giggles at your glare.

Shai, Evelyn, Goethe and Lineaus are the main protagonists of this book, but they are separated by centuries and continents.

Conclusion

Big Monkey is asleep in his room. Big Monkey makes growling noises. Little Monkey is asleep. Dog is with her. Yes, but when we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. Everything is connected in the great circle of life. You haven’t noticed anything too out of the ordinary at your dorm, well nothing stranger than what usually comes with a haunted house. Just the regular ectoplasm cleaning and drafts that sound like someone screaming. Fairly normal. Juan aches to be taken seriously as a singer and songwriter in his own right, and is driven by a desire for success. He’s intriguing and charismatic, his watery blue eyes captivate the camera, as he engages directly with Evans and ultimately us as an audience. He speaks of his success with great confidence, and talks openly about the future he sees for himself. You may well suspect that this a man with grand delusions, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. Juan is a complex man, and one with great doubts. Pariat calls her novel “a deeply political work”. The story brings alive the landscape of Meghalaya, its sacred forests, verdant hills, caves and streams, where the threat of extractivism looms large upon Indigenous communities. The book carries a strong motif of connecting with the larger world through movement and travel, what one of the characters calls “being more in the world”. It poignantly depicts the Nongiaid, a fictional nomadic tribe, and their disappearance after they are forced by the state to settle down. “The Nongiaid formed as one of these very important elem-ents that speaks very directly to this tussle between fixity and fluidity. They are the unsettled, wayward, wild, unruly and untamed that the Linnaean way of seeing is constantly trying to suppress, isolate, manipulate, tame, get rid of, and eliminate. This shows up in the larger context of our nation because you cannot speak of the Northeast, you cannot set a story there, no matter how wonderfully, beautifully, unnecessarily frivolous, without in some way alluding to this. That it is a region that is sacrificed so immensely to the larger nation-building project.”

Oh dear, I've said too much. Well, I suppose you'd have found out sooner or later - you being so clever and all. Just promise me you'll never visit that dreadful place. But you should’ve remembered that the headmage isn’t fully human and could hear your co-student with those pointed ears of his, “Yes! Yes, there’s no need for you two to be in as deep of despair as I am, oh aren’t I so sensitive to my students' feelings?” At the end of the book I was left feeling I had been on a journey both literal and emotional with the characters ,all of whom I found myself easily identifying with .Not a lot happens there is somehow not an end to any of the stories but I’m stead of feeling cheated I felt this was the whole point of the book For Evelyn, a Cambridge student, scientific inspiration guides her to the forests of the lower Himalayas and a world she has only read about.Goethe is a philosopher, writer, and one of the greatest minds of his age. While traveling through Italy in the 1780s, he formulates his ideas for “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” a little-known, revelatory text that challenges humankind’s propensity to reduce plants—and the world—into immutable parts.